Inabayaw: Sagada Mayor Has Failed to Submit His SALN Since 2007?

After waking up from a
night with an element of disaster-free earthquake, a news article published on
Friday about an accusation that the mayor of my hometown Sagada, Eduardo
Latawan, has not submitted his Statement of Assets, Liabilities and Networth
(SALN) caught my attention on Facebook.

Photo Courtesy of Hataw Tabloid

Whether it is true or not
that Latawan is guilty of the accusation, I cannot help but notice things in
the news article.

The title of the article is
about Sagada mayor facing charges for allegedly not submitting his SALN. However,
the story on Baguio City mayor Domogan advising government officials submitting
their SALN has taken more paragraphs of the news article than the story of the
Sagada mayor.

If my judgment serves me
right, it is like an article on Yahoo! or in a tabloid newspaper capitalizing
on the fame of Latawan for the article's publicity.

I cannot help but notice
that Grace Bandoy, known for being vocal against anti-SM protesters then, is
addressed as “anti-graft crusader”. It is my first time to encounter that term
and I do not know the exact requirements in journalism to call someone that
way.

The article is dated on
January 9, a Friday. As mentioned, the Mayor Latawan “cannot be reached for
comment”. I would like to assume that a Friday or close days before Friday is a
weekday wherein all offices are open. So, I would like to assume that the mayor
was absent at his office so he could not be reached for his side of the story.

I will be forever grateful
to Bandoy if her accusation is true. Why do we need to have an “anti-graft
crusader” to exert sweat just to make sure that all government officials are
submitting their SALN, when there is an agency for that! I cannot blame why
people keep on losing their faith in our system.

Mayor Latawan has been in
his office for three terms already. And if it is true that he never has submitted
his SALN since 2007, ay inayan ubpay sa!